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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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We don't live in ancapistan so we have to accept some government services given away at below market rates

A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector and redoing the cluster analysis. Existing clusters (companies) should be profitable and do many unprofitable things along the way (which they might argue ultimately help the bottom line) but you can reslice in different ways to share some services or remove things which merely compete without value add (e.g. advertising to counter the competition's ads). It's a bit difficult to determine what's ultimately accreative economic activity, just looking at the current clustering.

In a different world, with better policing/less crime making public transit more user friendly and with some union busting, to allow low hanging cost savings like train automation, the relative subsidies could fall while the social benefit grows - and the overall economy would waste less on transportation: roads are one thing, but car's depreciate quickly. Just imagine where we'd be with 7 decades of compounded investments instead!

A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector

Beware. If you do such analysis thoroughly with full historical perspective, if you follow all tracks and climb through all rabbit holes, you find out that not only our current system has nothing in common with "free market", that corporations and state institutions are just different tentacles of the same monster, and it has was always that been that way in all recorded history.

Persevere enough, and you will see yourself swiftly moving from right bottom corner to left bottom corner of political compass, you will be throwing away black-gold flags and portraits of Ayn Rand and replacing them black-red banners and pictures of more imposing Russians